Memoir Catch Up or How’s it Going?

Memoir Catch Up or How’s it Going?

Dear Friends,

Drei_Sonnenblumen_im_feld.

This is the time for talking about my memoir. Once a month I will catch you up on how it is going. I will try and do that the first Tuesday of the month. While each Friday I write a review of a picture book and hook it up to Susanna Leonard Hill’s blog of ‘Perfect Picture Book Friday.’ However last year I wrote more posts on memoir and did it randomly. If you are interested in reading those entries just go to the tag of memoir and magically you will be transported there.

Another one of my features which I will be doing on Tuesdays is the popular “Clarbojahn Presents!” where I introduce an author and their publishing journey. I have kidlit authors lined up as well as mystery writers. It should be a fun time. Now to tell you about my memoir.

My house holds secrets. It is a silent witness to what went on twenty years ago. The kitchen and living room silent walls of memory. My memoir is waking them up. I find myself reliving what went on back then in horror. When a memory springs forth I ask, “Did that really happen?”, “did that really go down that way?” How could I have been so callous and unloving?” “How could I have done that?”

In horror I relive the events. The situation of my life back then was formed in sorrow, 

shame and guilt. It was formed in stress and unrelenting work. I did not have any luxuries. And neither did my kids. I gave them a more difficult childhood than needed. The four years after my late husband’s death was made much harder by the fact that I was trying to cut down on a medication given to me ten years previously and at that time I had been told never to stop it.

The year after my late husband died I wanted to test that order. I thought that after ten years I may not need the medication I was told to never stop. I wanted to see life how it really was. I felt the medicine gave me rose colored glasses or some other way to see the world that was not the real world. “What is the REAL world?” “What is reality?” Is it some gray dark place or is it some ordinary pink place?”

Who has the right to determine what and how we see it? IS it is up the individual who sees it? It is true that the world is how we see it. Not what it is. The cave and its’ shadows. So difficult to see what is really outside of it? What is really in the sun? Not the cave. Not the dark wall. Who knows what I am talking about? Is it Plato’s discovery or view? What happened when ten people, trapped inside a cave for a long time see the back of the cave and then are freed afraid to look outside because they did not know what was real? Some thought the dark of the cave was real rather than the sun outside. They could not see the difference of their shadows made by the sun or the shadows of the cave.

What a difference the serotonin in our brain makes. Brain chemicals really do make a difference. And giving outside chemicals really does help. They help make the world less dark, less gray. Love is more abundant in a pink world. A world where the sun shines. Where one is not afraid to see the difference of the sun and the shadows the sun makes rather than the shadows the cave makes. I needed to turn around and see outside. What is the real world? The cave or outside of the cave?

Have any of you experienced this? Have any of you seen the world through a haze of gray rather than rose colored glasses? Or glasses of clear glass where one can see clearly? Where one’s love for her children’s was tarnished because of tough living conditions or where one  can love one’s children instead of just just surviving? Please share in the comments.

When all one’s energy goes to survival rather than to viewing other’s needs than the world is even darker and even grayer than necessary.

My memoir of battling my bipolar in the years after my husband died while cutting back on a medicine meant to help my brain chemistry, called; “Spiraling, My Battle With Bipolar Disorder” is in its second draft. Or should I say I am still struggling with the first draft since I am cutting back on extra documents I wrote for each chapter. I have about seven extra documents for each finished chapter. My classmates and I joke about bloated books. It is hard cutting back info, dialog, setting, narrative and memories from a draft so it is actually available for someone to look at.

But that is what I am starting to do. Making do with less.

Till Friday then. Where a  more fun post awaits. A Perfect Picture Book Friday post.

XOXO